The Consummate Collaborator: Bill Butler (1921&2023)

Wilmer “Bill” Butler, the cinematographer who will forever be linked with his work on “Jaws” (1975), left us on April 5, 2023, just two days shy of his 102nd birthday. A Colorado boy, he was born in a log cabin in 1921 in the tiny mining community of Cripple Creek before moving to Iowa with his farming family the year before “The Jazz Singer” introduced the notion of a “talkie” to motion pictures. An engineer by training, Bill got into the tech-side of radio in Gary, Indiana before helping to build WGN’s first television studios in Chicago. Curiosity in the new technology piqued, he picked up a camera where he cut his teeth shooting “thousands” of shows and documentaries with abrasive, driven, upstart television director William Friedkin. One of them, his first feature, is called “The People Vs. Paul Crump” (1962). It’s a shockingly effective, evergreen documentary punctuated by dramatic recreations in a style now oft-attributed to Errol Morris, telling the story of a death row prisoner convicted of killing a guard during a botched robbery at a meat packing plant. Immediately pulled from the broadcast schedule for the allegations of torture and coercion leveled at the Chicago PD, Friedkin stole a copy of the confiscated film and showed it to then-Governor Otto Kerner who, a day later, commuted Crump’s execution.  It launched Friedkin’s career. And though Butler would return to shoot television often during his career, when Friedkin went to Hollywood, Bill went with him. While Friedkin was off helming a spoof called “Good Times” (1967) with Sonny & Cher, Bill shot Phil Kaufman’s Frankenstein comedy “Fearless Frank” (1967), notable as Jon Voight’s debut but also for Butler’s interest in the natural world; his gift for capturing the emotional intimacy of family relationships through effortless, unforced framing; his fondness for the slow push-in and extreme close-up to amplify tension; of key-lighting and even a closing-iris in-camera effect to draw attention to details in a scene; and for shooting from extreme high and low angles to provide visual interest and texture. When freshly-reanimated corpse Frank (Voight) foils a diabolical cat burglar in Fearless Frank, he punches the villain all the way up a spiral staircase with one swing. Butler shoots the felon’s dazed mug from above so our sightline tracks all the way down and around to Frank, still at the bottom, looking up with one fist raised in the follow-through. Butler wasn’t ostentatious, he was succinct. Everything you needed to know, you get in one shot. In simpler terms, Butler’s way of seeing, born of modest, tightly-knit roots, a farmer’s love for the outdoors and an engineer’s and technological auto-didact’s ingenuity, helped to define the look of the greatest era of film in the history of the medium. Bill Butler grounded the incomprehensibility of the American ‘70s—the energy and the cacophony of it; the feeling of change carried before a violent, anarchic gale. Already 46 years old during the Summer of Love, he wasn’t one of the “Film Brats,” that group of tousled trailblazers who filled the gulf left behind by a decrepit studio system that found itself out of step with the tastes of the Flower Power generation. He was there for Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut “Drive, He Said” (1971). He was there, too, for Robert Culp’s first and only directorial effort, 1972’s tremendous and sadly underseen LA noir “Hickey & Boggs,” the first produced screenplay by a young writer named Walter Hill for which Butler re-used the sunset beach shot at the end of “Fearless Frank”. Then, much later, he shot actor Bill Paxton’s directorial debut “Frailty” (2001). In an interview with the Austin Chronicle in April of 2002, Paxton says “I wanted my first movie to have some great craft in all of the departments, and cinematically speaking, I knew that Bill Butler could do that.” If mentorship wasn’t a role Butler craved, it was one it seemed in which he was cast. Butler provided a look for “Frailty,” intimate and warm before it becomes insinuating and sinister, keyed in on the father/son dynamics that drive the piece.  Notably, he worked early on with two members of the New American Cinema’s crowded Mount Rushmore: Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. Butler helped change moviemaking with Spielberg” on “Jaws,” and was the cinematographer for my favorite film of all time, and my pick for the best of what seems an impossibly deep, indeed inexhaustible well of great films and filmmakers in that “decade” between 1967 and 1981, Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974). But Butler had worked with both filmmakers before. With Spielberg, he shot a pair of TV movies: the superlative possession/evil child movie (that dropped the year before “The Exorcist”) “Something Evil” (1972), and then a Martin Landau-starring investigative reporter saga “Savage” (1973). In “Something Evil,” you can see the formation of one of the genuine savants this medium has ever produced and, certainly